Fed up with spam? Bright Light wants to block it for you -- for free.
Monday the company launched Bright Mail, a free personal version of its system for blocking unsolicited email.
"We've taken this service that has until now only been available to ISPs and corporations and are making it available to consumers," said Bright Light founder and CEO Sunil Paul.
"The obvious benefit is that you don't have spam in your email account anymore."
The company is offering the service direct to end users in hopes of building more awareness of the year-old ISP and corporate network service that it sells.
The service runs as a proxy recipient of the user's email. After registering for the service, the customer's existing mail server hands it off to Bright Light. If Bright Light's database of known spam doesn't filter it out, the system delivers it on to the end user.
"It doesn't require any intervention by an administrator," Paul said. Bright Light said it surveyed 655 users of a beta version of the service one month ago.
"Seventy percent said that we had solved their spam problem," Paul said. No one reported the loss of legitimate messages as a result.
The company said its measurements show that its corporate for-fee service has stopped over 80 percent of the spam headed to users' inboxes. The system also gets smarter with age, Paul said. At launch, Bright Mail stopped only 50 to 70 percent of spam.
"It'll be an attractive offer to people who want to control the amount of spam they get. Bright Light should be commended," said John Mozena, who works for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.
Software filters have been available before, but Mozena said they require maintenance skills most end users don't have.
"It's a good stop-gap until we're able to find a more global solution to spam," Mozena said. CAUCE continues to push for anti-spam legislation, such as amending the federal statute outlawing junk faxes to include junk email.
Once 5 percent of individual users of ISPs and corporate networks sign up, Bright Light will approach the companies to license the service network-wide. For corporations, the price is US$10 per user per year. ISP-sized accounts are heavily discounted off that, Paul said.
But if network administrators don't bite, latecomers may find themselves cut out of the free offering. Officially, the company plans to put a cap on the percentage of free users on an individual ISP or network.
"As long as they're part of the first 5 percent they won't have that issue. Beyond that first 5 percent we won't have any guarantees."
